THE INDIVIDUALINTERVIEW E INTERVIEWSOCIETY lance, the interview seems the interviewer's coordinating activity and nd self-evident. The inter- the available repository of answers. Should oordinates a conversation a respondent ask questions in his or her g desired information. He own right, the interviewer typically treats e initial contact, schedules these questions as requests for clarification. nates its location, sets out The interviewer's responses are merely a es, and then begins to ques- means of keeping the intervievr wee or "respondent." Ques- . spondent on track. spondents are relatively pas- graphic questionnaires, prod1 les, which are delimited by veys, public opinion polls, i and thf:re- 6 ggiswers in more or less antici- This is the familiar asymmetrical rela- %&until the interviewer's agenda tionship that we recognize as interviewing. $4gnd the interview ends. Except for technical nuances, we are con- &dent provides the answers. versant with either role in the encounter. * , s P I 1 + ?&~.hk;gsuaily well aware of the rou- Most educated urbanites, for instance, " t ~ , , ,$b s :,ag&@&idquntil questions are posed be- would know what it means to interview The respondent's obliga- someone and would be able to manage the -:&!a '34sas" ax 3% a&tt&acmanagethe encounter or to activity adequately in its broad details, Qbut to offer information from from start to finish, if asked to do so. Like-" { 4 " '$" s ' I ~ CI~&C #~rsonalcache of experiential wise, most of us readily respond to demo- uct-U and sur- :alth 4 + INTRODUCTION From the Individula1 Interview to the Interview Society + 5 inventories in considerable detail; we are willing and able to provide all sorts of in- formation to strangers about the most inti- mate aspects of our lives. We carry out such encounterstime and again with little hesita- tion and hardly an afterthought. The indi- vidual interview has become a common- place feature of everyday life. + The Democratization of Opinion As familiar as it seems today, the interview, as a procedure for securing knowledge, is relatively new historically. Indeed, individ- uals have not always been viewed as impor- tant sources of knowledge about their own experience. Of course, we can imagine that particular forms of questioning and an- swering have been with us since the begin- ning of talk. As long as parental authority has existed, for example, fathers and moth- ers have undoubtedly questioned their chil- dren regarding their whereabouts; children have been expected to provide answers, not questions, in response. Similarly, suspects and prisoners have been interrogated for as long as suspicion and incarceration have been a part of human affairs. Healers, priests, employers, journalists, and many others seeking immediate, practical knowl- edge about everyday life have all under- taken interviewlike activity. Nevertheless, not so long ago it would have seemed rather peculiar for an individ- ual to approach a complete stranger and ask for permission to discuss personal mat- ters. Daily life was more intimate; everyday business was conducted on a face-to-face basis between persons who were well ac- quainted with one another. According to Mark Benney and Everett Hughes (1956), there was a time when the interview simply didn't exist as a social form; they noted more than 40 years ago that "the interview [as we now refer to it] is a relatively new kind of encounter in the history of human relations" (p. 139). Benney and Hughes were not saying that the activity of asking and answering questions was new, but rather that information gathering did not always rely upon the interview encounter. Although centuries ago a father might have interrogated his children concerning their whereabouts, this was not interviewing as we have come to know it today. The inter- view emerged only when specific informa- tion-gathering roles were formalized. This encounter would hardly be recognizable in a world of close relationships where the stranger was more likely to signify danger and the unknown than to be understood as a neutral conduit for the transmission of personal knowledge (Benney and Hughes 1956). The modern interview changed all of this. Especially after World War 11,with the emergence of the standardized survey in- terview, individuals became accustomed to offering information and opinions that had no immediate bearing on their lives and so- cial relations. Individuals could forth- rightly add their thoughts and feelings to the mix of "public opinion." Indeed, it be- came feasible for the first time for individu- alsto speakwith strangers about all manner of thoughts concerning their lives, because these new strangers (that is, interviewers) didn't tell, at least in personally recogniz- able terms. Individuals-no matter how in- significant they might seem in the everyday scheme of things-came to be viewed as im- portant elements of populations. Each per- son had a voice and it was imperative that each voice be heard, at least in principle. Seeking everyone's opinions, the interview has increasingly democratized experiential information. THE MODERN TEMPER David Riesman and Benney (1956)con- sidered the interview format to be the prod- uct of a changing world of relationships, one that developed rapidly following the war years. The new era gradually accepted routine conversational exchanges between strangers; when people encountered inter- view situations, they were not immediately defensive about being asked for informa- tion about their lives, their associates, or their deepest sentiments, even though, in certain quarters, defensiveness was under- standable because of perceived linkages be- tween interviewing and oppression. Within this world, we have come to recognize eas- ily two new roles associated with talking about oneself and one's life with strangers: the role of the interviewer and the role of the respondent-the centerpieces of the fa- miliar interview. This is an outgrowth of what Riesman and Benney called "the modern temper," a term that we take to have both cultural and interpersonal resonances. Culturally, it de- notes a shared understanding that the indi- vidual has the wherewithal to offer a mean- ingful description of, or set of opinions about, his or her life. Individuals, in their own right, are accepted as significant com- mentators on their own experience; it is not just the "chief" community commentator who speaks for one and all, in other words, or the local representative of the common- wealth whose opinions are taken to express the thoughts and feelings of every mind and heart in the vicinity. This modern temper is also interper- sonal, in that it democratizes the interpre- tation of experience by providing a work- ing space and means for expressing public opinion. Everyone-each individual-is taken to have significant views and feelings about life that are accessible to others who undertake to ask about them. As William James ([I89211961)noted at the end of the 19thcentury, this assumes that each and ev- ery individual has a sense of self that is owned and controlled by him- or herself, even if the self is socially formulated and in- terpersonally responsive. This self makes it possible for everyone to reflect meaning- fully on individual experience and to enter into sociallyrelevant dialogue about it. The modern temper has made it reasonable and acceptable to turn to aworld of individuals, most of whom are likely to be strangers, as a way of understanding the social organiza- tion of experience. Just as the interview itself is a recent de- velopment, the selection of ordinary indi- viduals as sources of information and opin- ions is also relatively new (see Kent 1981; Oberschall 1965; Selvin 1985). As Pertti Alasuutari (1998) explains, it was not so long ago that when one wanted to know something important about society or so- cial life, one invariably asked those consid- ered to be "in the know." In contrast to what seems self-evident today-that is, questioning those individuals whose expe- riences are under consideration-the obvi- ous and efficient choice for very early inter- viewers was to ask informed citizens to provide answers to their questions. Alasuutari provides an example from An- thony Oberschall's work: It was natural that the questions were posed to knowledgeable citizens, such as state officials or church ministers. In other words, they were informants in expert interviews. For instance, in a survey of agricultural laborers con- ducted in 1874-1875 in Germany (Oberschall 1965: 19-20), question No. 25 read: "Is there a tendency among laborers to save money in order to be able to buy their own plot of land later on? Does this tendency appear al- ready among the unmarried workers or only after marriage?" . . .The modern survey would of course approach such questions quite differently. Instead of asking an informed person whether married or unmarried workers have a ; tendency to save money to buy their own plot of land, a sample of workers would be asked about their marital sta- tus, savings, and plans about how to use them. (Pp. 135-36) Those considered to be knowledgeable in the subject matter under consideration, Alasuutari notes, were viewed as infor- 6 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society 7 mants, not respondents, the latter being su- perfluous under the circumstances. AN INDIVIDUALIZING DISCOURSE The research consequence of the subse- quent democratization of opinion was part of a trend toward increased surveillance in everyday life. The growing discourse of in- dividuality combined with an increasingly widespread and efficient apparatus for in- formation processing. Although interview- ing and the resulting production of public opinion developed rapidly after World War 11, the widespread surveillance of daily life and the deployment of the category of the individual had begun centuries earlier. Michel Foucault's (1973, 1975, 1977, 1978)iconoclastic studies of the discursive organization of subjectivity shed fascinat- ing light on the development of the con- cepts of the personal self and individuality. Time and again, in institutional contexts ranging from the medical clinic and the asy- lum to the prison, Foucault shows us how what he calls "technologies of the self" have transformed the way we view the sources and structure of our subjectivity (see Drey- fus and Rabinow 1982; Foucault 1988). We use the term subjectivity here to indi- cate the type(s) of subject(s) that individu- als and cultures might comprehend and em- body. With respect to the interview, we are referring to the putative agent who stands behind the "facades" of interview partici- pants, so to speak, the agent who is held practically and morally responsible for the participants' words and actions. Most of us are so familiar with the contemporary Western image of the individualized self as this agent that we find it difficult to com- prehend alternative subjectivities. Clifford Geertz (1984), however, points out that this is "a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures" (p. 126).In other societies and historical periods, agency and responsibility have been articu- lated in relation to a variety of other social structures, such as the tribe, the clan, the lineage, the family, the community, and the monarch. The notion of the bounded, unique self, more or less integrated as the center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, is a very recent version of the subject. Foucault offers us new insights into how this sense of subjectivity evolved. Technol- ogies of the self,in Foucault's terms, are the concrete, socially and historically located institutional practices through which a rel- atively new sense of who and what we are as human beings was constructed. These prac- tices advanced the notion that each and ev- ery one of us has an ordinary self-the idea being that each one could acceptably reflect on his or her individual experience, person- ally describe it, and communicate opinions about it and its surrounding world in his or her own terms. This transformed our sense of human beings as subjects. The now self-evident view that each of us has opin- ions of public significance became intelligi- ble onlywithin a discourse ofindividuality. Foucault argues that the newly formed technologies of surveillance of the 18thand 19th centuries, the quintessential manifes- tation of which was Jeremy Bentham's all-seeingpanopticon, did not just incorpo- rate and accommodate the experiences of individual subjects who populated the con- temporary social landscape, but, instead, entered into the construction of individual subjects in their own right. Foucault poi- gnantly exemplifies this transformation in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish (1977),a book that is as much about the in- dividuation of society as it is about "the birth of the prison" (its subtitle). In the opening pages, we cringe at a vivid account of the torture of a man condemned to death for attempting to assassinate King Louis XV of France. We despair as the man's body is flayed, burned, and drawn and quartered in public view. From contemporary com- mentary, Foucault (1977) describes the events: On 2 March 1757Damiens the regicide was condemned "to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris," where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds"; then, "in the said cart, to the Place de Gr?ve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he com- mitted the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body con- sumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds." (P. 3) Foucault asks why criminals were sub- jected to such horrible bodily torture. Why were they made to beg for forgiveness in public spectacles? His answer is that the spectacle of torture was an event whose po- litical culture was informed by a sense of the seamless relations among the body of the king (the crown), social control, and subjectivity. As all people were, Damiens was conceived literally and legally as a sub- ject of the king; his body and soul were in- separable extensions of the crown. An as- sault on the body of the king had to be attacked in turn, as a red-hot iron might be used to cauterize a festering wound. The spectacle of torture did not revolve around an autonomous agent who was regarded as an independent subject with a self, feelings, opinions, and experiential reality uniquely his own. This might have caused others sympathetically to consider Damiens's treatment to be cruel and unusual punish- ment, to put it in today's terms. The disposition of the times, however, offered no sympathy for what Damiens might have been "going through." In the eyes of others, Damiens's feelings and opin- ions had no standing apart from the man's station in relation to the sovereign. The spectacle of punishment rested on a dis- course of knowledge and power that lodged all experiential truth in the sover- eign's shared embodiment. As Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982)explain: "The figure of torture brings together a complex of power, truth, and bodies. The atrocity of torture was an enactment of power that also revealed truth. Its applica- tion on the body of the criminal was an act of revenge and an art" (p. 146). The idea that a thinking, feeling, consequential sub- ject occupied the body of the criminal was simply beyond the pale of contemporary understanding. Individuality, as we know it today, did not exist as a recognizable social form. A few pages later in Discipline and Pun- ish, Foucault presents the new subject who comes into being as part of a discourse that is more in tune with "the modern temper." Discussing the evolution of penal reform, he describes the emergence of the "house of young prisoners" in Paris a mere 80 years after Damiens's death. Torture as a public spectacle has gradually disappeared. The "gloomy festival of punishment" is dying out, along with the accused's agonizing plea for pardon. It has been replaced by a humanizing regimen, informed by a dis- course of the independent, thinking subject whose criminality is correctable. Rehabili- tation is replacing retribution. Scientific methods of scrutiny and courses of instruc- tion are viewed as the means for returning the criminal to right reason and back to the proper fold of society.The subjectis no lon- ger a selfless appendage of a larger entity; this is a new agent, one with a mind and sentiments of his or her own. With the proper regimen, this new agent is incited to individual self-scrutiny and responds to corrective action. In time, this same subject would duly of- fer his or her opinions and sentiments within the self-scrutinizing regimens of 8 + INTRODUCTION From the Individ.ual Interview to the Interview Society + 9 what Foucault calls "governmentality," the archipelago of surveillance practices suf- fusing modern life. As James Miller (1993: 299) points out, governmentality extends well beyond the political and penal to in- clude pedagogical, spiritual, and religious dimensions (see also Garland 1997). If Bentham's original panopticon was an effi- cient form of prison observation, panopti- cism in the modern temper becomes the widespread self-scrutiny that "governs" all aspects of everyday life in the very com- monplace questions and answers posed about ourselves in both our inner thoughts and our public expressions. These are seemingly daily inquiries about what we personally think and feel about every con- ceivable topic, including our deepest senti- ments and most secret actions. We can readily view the individual inter- view as part of modern governmentality, impressed upon us by myriad inquiries into our lives. Indeed, the interviewmay be seen as one of the 20th century's most distinc- tive technologies of the self. In particular, it gives an "objective," "scientific" cast to the notion of the individual self, terms of refer- ence that resolutely echo modern times. As Nikolas Rose (1990, 1997) has shown in the context of the psychological sciences, the private self, along with its descriptive data, was invented right along with the technologies we now associate with mea- surement. "Scientific surveillance" such as psycho- logical testing, case assessments, and, of course, individual interviews of all kinds have created the experiencing and inform- ing respondent we now take for granted. The category of "the person" now identi- fies the self-reflective constituents of soci- ety (see Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985;Lidz 1976);if we want to know what the social world is like, we now ask its indi- vidual inhabitants. The individual inter- view on a personal scale and the social sur- vey on the societal level serve as democratizing agents, giving voice to indi- viduals and, in the process, formulating "public" opinion. LEARNING FROM STRANGERS The title of Robert Weiss's (1994) book on interviewing, Learning from Strangers, points to the shared expectations that sur- round the face-to-face experience of inter- viewing, as the book lays out L'theart and method of qualitative interview studies." Although qualitative interviews especially are sometimes conducted with acquain- tances (see Warren, Chapter 4, this vol- ume), much of Weiss's advice on how an in- terviewer should proceed is based on the premise that the interviewer does not know the respondent. Behind each bit of advice about how to interview effectively is the understanding that each and every stranger-respondent is someone worth lis- tening to. The respondent is someone who can provide detailed descriptions of his or her thoughts, feelings, and activities, if the interviewer asks and listens carefully enough. The trick, in Weiss's judgment, is for the interviewer to present a caring and concerned attitude, expressed within a well-planned and encouraging format. The aim of the interviewer is to derive, as objec- tively as possible, the respondent's own opinions of the subject matter in question, information that the respondent will readily offer and elaborate when the cir- cumstances are conducive to his or her do- ing so and the proper methods are applied. The full range of individual experiences is potentially accessible, according to Weiss; the interview is a virtual window on that experience, a kind of universal panop- ticon. In answering the question of why we interview, Weiss offers a compelling por- trayal of the democratization of opinion: Interviewing gives us access to the ob- servations of others. Through inter- viewing we can learn about places we have not been and could not go and about settings in which we have not lived. If we have the right informants, we can learn about the quality of neigh- borhoods or what happens in families or how organizations set their goals. In- terviewing can inform us about the na- ture of social life. We can learn about the work of occupations and how peo- ple fashion careers, about cultures and the values they sponsor, and about the challenges people confront as they lead their lives. We can learn also, through inter- viewing, about people's interior experi- ences. We can learn what people per- ceived and how they interpreted their perceptions. We can learn how events affect their thoughts and feelings. We can learn the meanings to them of their relationships, their families, their work, and their selves. We can learn about all the experiences, from joy through grief, that together constitutethe human con- dition. (l?1) The opportunities for knowing even strangers by way of their opinions are now ubiquitous. We find interviews virtually ev- erywhere. We have come a very long way from the days when individuals' experi- ences and voices simply didn't matter, a long way from Damiens's "unheard" cries. The interview itself has created, as well as tapped into, the vast world of individual experience that now constitutes the sub- stance of everyday life. + The Interview Society If the interview has helped to constitute the modern individual, has it simultaneously transformed society? It certainly has trans- ported the myriad details of the most per- sonal experience into the public domain. Indeed, it has established these realms as important sites for securing answers to what it means to be part of everyday life. Our social world now comprises viable and consequential individual opinions, assem- bled and offered up by actively agentic sub- jects, whose responses convey the individ- ual particulars of modern society. With the spread of the discourse of individualized subjectivity, we now are prepared as both questioners and answerers to produce readily the society of which we are a part. The modern temper gives us the interview as a significant means for realizing that sub- jectivity and the social contexts that bring it about. THE MEDIATION OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE Interviewing of all kinds mediates con- temporary life. Think of how much we learn about today's world by way of inter- views conducted across a broad spectrum of venues, well beyond research practice. Interviews, for example, are a source of popular celebrity and notoriety. Television interview host Larry King introduces us to politicians and power brokers who not only share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions with a mass audience but cultivate their ce- lebrity status in the process. This combines with programming devoted to exposingthe deepest personal, not just political or so- cial, sentiments of high-profile figures. Ce- lebrity news commentators/interviewers like Barbara Walters plumb the emotional depths of stars and pundits from across the media spectrum. To this, add the likes of talk-show hosts Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake, and Jerry Springer,who daily invite ordinary men and women, the emotionally tortured, and the behaviorally bizarre to "spill their guts" in front of mil- lions of television viewers. Referring to all of these, the interview is becoming the ex- periential conduit par excellence of the electronic age.And this is only the tip of the iceberg, as questions and answers fly back and forth on the Internet, where chat rooms are now as intimate as back porches and bedrooms. Interviews extend to professional prac- tice as well. As the contributions to Part I11 of this Handbook indicate, myriad institu- tions employ interviewing to generate use- ful and often crucial information. Physi- cians conduct medical interviews with their 10 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 11 patients in order to formulate diagnoses and monitor treatment and progress (see Zoppi and Epstein, Chapter 18). Em- ployers interview job applicants (see Latham and Millman, Chapter 23).Psycho- therapy has always been a largely inter- view-based enterprise. Its varied psycho- logical and psychiatric perspectives have perhaps diversified the interview more than any other professional practice. As Gale Miller, Steve de Shazer, and Peter De Jong show in their essay on the therapy in- terview (Chapter 19),this ranges from tra- ditional forms of in-depth interviewing to more contemporary solution-focused en- counters that center on "restorying" expe- rience. Even forensic investigation has come a long way from the interview prac- tices of the Inquisition, where giving the "third degree" was a common feature of in- terrogation (see McKenzie, Chapter 21). As interviewing has become more perva- sive in the mass media and in professional practice, the interviewing industry itself has developed by leaps and bounds. Survey research, public opinion polling, and mar- keting research lead the way. Survey re- search has always been conducted for aca- demic purposes, but today it is increasingly employed in service to commercial inter- ests as well (see Platt, Chapter 2, this vol- ume). The interviewing industry now extends from individual product-use inquiries to group interviewing services, where focus group discussions quickly establish con- sumer product preferences. Movie studios even use focus groups to decide which ver- sions of motion picture finales will be most popularly received. Indeed, the group in- terview is among the most rapidly growing information-gathering techniques on the contemporary scene (see Morgan, Chapter 7, this volume). The ubiquity and significance of the in- terview in our daily lives has prompted Da- vid Silverman (1997) to suggest that "per- haps we all live in what might be called an 'interview society,' in which interviews seem central to making sense of our lives" (p. 248; see also Silverman 1993). Silver- man's reasoning underscores the democra- tization of opinion that interviewing has enhanced. Silverman (1997) identifies three conditions required by an interview society. First, an interview society requires a particular informing subjectivity, "the emergence of the self as a proper object of narration." Societies with forms of collec- tive or cosmic subjectivity, for example, do not provide the practical basis for learning from strangers. This is possible only in soci- eties where there is a prevalent and shared sense that any individual has the potential to be a respondent and, as such, has some- thing meaningful to offer when asked to do so. Second, Silverman points to the need for an information-gathering apparatus he calls the "technology of the confessional." In other words, an interview society needs a practical means for securing the communi- cative by-product of "confession." This, Silverman (1997) points out, should com- monly extend to friendship not only "with the policeman, but with the priest, the teacher, and the 'psy' professional" (p. 248). Third, and perhaps most important, an interview society requires that a mass tech- nology be readily available. An interview society is not the product of the age-old medical interview, or of the long-standing practice of police interrogation; rather, it requires that an interviewing establishment be recognizably in place throughout soci- ety. Virtually everyone should be familiar with the goals of interviewing as well as what it takes to conduct an interview. Silverman argues that many contempo- rary societies have met these conditions, some more than others. Not only do media and human service professionals utilize in- terviews, but it has been estimated that fully 90 percent of all social science investiga- tions exploit interview data (Briggs 1986). Internet surveys now provide instant ques- tions and answers about every imaginable subject; we are asked to state our inclina- tions and opinions regarding everything from presidential candidates to which char- acters on TV serials should be retained or ousted. The interview society, it seems, has firmly arrived, is well, and is flourishing as a leading context for addressing the subjec- tive contours of daily living. THE ROMANTIC IMPULSE Paul Atkinson and Silverman (1997) point out that the confessional properties of the interview not only construct individ- ual subjectivity but, more and more, deepen and broaden the subjects' experien- tial truths. We no longer readily turn to the cosmos, the gods, the written word, the high priest, or local authorities for authen- tic knowledge; rather, we commonly search for authenticity through the in- depth interview. The interview society not only reflexively constructs a compatible subject, but fully rounds this out ontologi- cally by taking us to the proverbial heart of the subject in question. This reveals the romantic impulse be- hind the interview and the interview soci- ety. If we desire to "really know" the indi- vidual subject, then somehow we must provide a means to hear his or her genuine voice. Superficial discussion does not seem to be adequate. Many interviewers explore the emotional enclaves of the self by way of "open-ended" or "in-depth" interviewing. Although, technically, "open-endedness" is merely a way to structure the interview process, Atkinson and "Silverman suggest that the term also flags a particular social understanding, namely, that the true, inter- nal voice of the subject comes through only when it is not externally screened or other- wise communicatively constrained. But, as Atkinson and Silverman advise, authenticity in practice is not an ultimate experiential truth. It is itself a methodically constructed social product that emerges from its reflexive communicative practices. In other words, authenticity, too, has its constructive technology. Recognizable signs of emotional expression and scenic prac- tices such as direct eye contact and intimate gestures are widely understood to reveal deep truths about individual selves (seealso Gubrium and Holstein 1997; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). In in-depth interviews, we "do" deep, authentic experiences as much aswe "do" opinion offering in the course of the survey interview. It is not simply a mat- ter of procedure or the richness of data that turns researchers, the interview society, and its truth-seeing audiences to in-depth and open-ended interviewing. It is also a matter of collaboratively making audible and visible the phenomenal depths of the individual subject at the center of our shared concerns. THE LEADING THEME It would therefore be a mistake to treat the interview-or any information-gather- ing technique-as simply a research proce- dure. The interview is part and parcel of our society and culture. It is not just a way of obtaining information about who and what we are; it is now an integral, constitu- tive feature of our everyday lives. Indeed, as the romantic impulses of interviewing imply, it is at the very heart of what we have become and could possibly be as individu- als. That is the leading theme of this Hand- book: "No method of research can stand outside the cultural and material world" (Silverman 1997:249). Whereas some would view the interview primarily as a re- search technique, we would do well also to consider its broader social, institutional, and representational contours. At the same time, we must be cautious lest the latter overshadow the interview's informa- tion-gathering contributions, which have been brilliantly and extensively developed by interview researchers for decades. To recognize, elaborate, and deconstruct the broad contours of the interview is not at all 12 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 13 to suggest that we pay less attention to its technology in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, it implies just the opposite; we must think carefully about technical matters because they produce the detailed subject as much as they gather information about him or her. Taken together, the chap- ters of this Handbook provide a balance of related concerns, extending from aspects of the conventional technology of the inter- view-including forms of interviewing and diverse data gathering and analytic strate- gies-to the various ways interviewing re- lates to distinctive respondents, its institu- tional auspices, and representational issues. + The Subjects behind Interview Participants We began this introductory chapter by not- ing that the interview seems simple and self-evident. In actual practice, this is hardly the case. If the technology of the in- terview not only produces interview data but also simultaneously constructs individ- ual and public opinion, what are the work- ing contours of the encounter? What does it mean, in terms of communicative prac- tice, to be an interviewer? What is the pre- sumed subjectivity of this participant? Cor- respondingly, what does it mean to be a respondent? What is the presumed subjec- tivity of that participant? These, of course, are procedural questions, to a degree, and several authors who contribute to this Handbook address them in just these terms. As the chapters that follow show, there is nothing technically simple about the con- temporary practice of asking and answer- ing interview questions. But the questions also broker discursive and institutional is- sues related to matters of contemporary subjectivity. This complicates things, and it is to these issues that we turn in the rest of this chapter as a way of providing a more nuanced context for understanding the in- dividual interview and the interview soci- ety. Let's begin to unpack the complications by examining competing visions of the sub- jects who are imagined to stand behind in- terview participants. Regardless of the type of interview, there is always a working model of the subject lurking behind the per- sons assigned the roles of interviewer and respondent (Holstein and Gubrium 1995). By virtue of the kinds of subjects we pro- ject, we confer varying senses of epistemo- logical agency upon interviewers and re- spondents. These, in turn, influence the ways we proceed technically, as well as our understanding of the relative validity of the information that is produced. As we noted at the outset, interviewing typically has been viewed as an asymmetri- cal encounter in which an interviewer solic- its information from an interviewee, who relatively passively responds to the inter- viewer's inquiries. This commonsensical, if somewhat oversimplified, view suggests that those who want to find out about an- other person's feelings, thoughts, or activi- ties merely have to ask the right questions and the other's "reality" will be revealed. Studs Terkel, the legendary journalistic and sociological interviewer, makes the process sound elementary; he claims that he merely turns on his tape recorder and asks people to talk. Using his classic study Working (1972)as an example, Terkel claimsthat his questions merely evoke responses that in- terviewees are all too ready to share: There were questions, of course. But they were casual in nature . . .the kind you would ask while having a drink with someone; the kind he would ask you. ...In short, it was a conversation. In time, the sluice gates of damned up hurts and dreams were open. (l?xxv) As unsophisticated and guileless as it sounds, this image is common in interview- ing practice. The image is one of "mining" or "prospecting" for the facts and feelings residing within the respondent. Of course, a highly sophisticated technology tells re- searcher/prospectors how to ask questions, what sorts of questions not to ask, the order in which to ask them, and ways to avoid saying things that might spoil, contami- nate, or bias the data. The basic model, however, locates valued information inside the respondent and assigns the interviewer the task of somehow extracting it. THE PASSIVE SUBJECT BEHIND THE RESPONDENT In this rather conventionalview, the sub- jects behind respondents are basically con- ceived as passive vessels of answers for ex- periential questions put to them by interviewers. Subjects are repositories of facts, feelings, and the related particulars of experience. They hold the answers to de- mographic questions, such as age, gender, race, occupation, and socioeconomic sta- tus. They contain information about social networks, including household composi- tion, friendship groups, circles of care, and other relationships. These repositories also hold a treasure trove of experiential data pertinent to beliefs, feelings, and activities. The vessel-like subject behind the re- spondent passively possesses information the interviewer wants to know; the respon- dent merely conveys, for better or worse, what the subject already possesses. Occa- sionally, such as with sensitive interview topics or with recalcitrant respondents, in- terviewers acknowledge that the task may be especially difficult. Nonetheless, the in- formation is viewed, in principle, as the un- contaminated contents of the subject's ves- sel of answers. The knack is to formulate questions and provide an atmosphere con- ducive to open and undistorted communi- cation between interviewer and respon- dent. Much of the methodological literature on interviewing deals with the facets of these intricate matters. The vessel-of-answers view leads interviewers to be careful in how they ask questions, lest their method of inquiry bias what lies within the subject. This perspective has prompted the devel- opment of myriad procedures for obtaining unadulterated facts and details, most of which rely upon interviewer and question neutrality. Successful implementation of disinterested practices elicits objective truths from the vessel of answers. Validity results from the successful application of these techniques. In the vessel-of-answers model, the im- age of the subject is not of an agent engaged in the production of knowledge. If the in- terviewing process goes "by the book" and is nondirectional and unbiased, respon- dents can validly proffer information that subjects presumably merely store within. Contamination emanates from the inter- view setting, its participants, and their in- teraction, not from the subject, who, under ideal conditions, is capable of providing ac- curate, authentic reports. THE PASSIVE SUBJECT BEHIND THE INTERVIEWER This evokes a complementary model of the subject behind the interviewer. Al- though not totally passive, the inter- viewerJsubject nonetheless stands apart from the actual "data" of the field; he or she merely collects what is already there. To be sure, the collection process can be arduous, but the objective typically is to tap into in- formation without unduly disturbing- and, therefore, biasing or contaminating- the respondent's vessel of answers. If it is not quite like Terkel's "sluice gates" meta- phor, it still resembles turning on a spigot; the interviewer's role is limited to releasing what is already in place. 14 + INTRODUCTION From the Individua1 Interview to the Interview Society + 15 The interviewer, for example, is ex- pected to keep the respondent's vessel of answers in plain view but to avoid shaping the information that is extracted. Put sim- ply, this involves the interviewer's control- ling him- or herself so as not to influence what the passive interview subject will communicate. The interviewer must dis- card serious self-consciousness; the inter- viewer must avoid any action that would imprint his or her presence onto the re- spondent's reported experience. The inter- viewer must resist supplying particular frames of reference for the respondent's answers. To the extent such frameworks appropriately exist, they are viewed as em- bedded in the subject's world behind the re- spondent, not behind the researcher. If the interviewer isto be at all self-conscious, this is technically limited to his or her being alert to the possibility that he or she may be contaminating or otherwise unduly influ- encing the research process. Interviewers are generally expected to keep their "selves" out of the interview pro- cess. Neutrality is the byword. Ideally, the interviewer uses his or her interpersonal skills merely to encourage the expression of, but not to help construct, the attitudes, sentiments, and information in question. In effect, the image of the passive subject be- hind the interviewer is one of a facilitator. As skilled as the interviewer might be in practice, all that he or she appropriately does in principle is to promote the expres- sion of the actual attitudes and information that lie in waiting in the respondent's vessel of answers. In exerting control in this way, the inter- viewer limits his or her involvement in the interview to a specific preordained role-which can be quite scripted-that is constant from one interview to another. Should the interviewer go out of control, so to speak, and introduce anything but varia- tions on specified questions into the inter- view, the passive subject behind the inter- viewer is methodologically violated and neutrality is compromised. It is not this pas- sive subject who is the problem, but rather the interviewer who has not adequately regulated his or her conduct so as to facili- tate the expression of respondent informa- tion. ACTIVATING INTERVIEW SUBJECTS As researchers have become more aware of the interview as a site for the production of meaning, they have increasingly come to appreciate the activity of the subjects pro- jected behind both the respondent and the interviewer. The interview is being recon- ceptualized as an occasion for purposefully animated participants to construct versions of reality interactionally rather than merely purvey data (see Holstein and Gubrium 1995). This trend reflects an increasingly pervasive appreciation for the constitutive character of social interaction and of the constructive role played by active subjects in authoring their experiences. Sentiments along these lines have been building for some time across diverse disci- plines. Nearly a half century ago, for exam- ple, Ithiel de Sola Pool (1957),a prominent critic of public opinion polling, argued presciently that the dynamic, communica- tive contingencies of the interview literally activated respondents' opinions. Every in- terview, Pool suggested, is an "interper- sonal drama with a developing plot" (p. 193).The metaphor conveys a far more active sense of interview participation than the "prospector for meaning" suggests. As Pool indicated: The social milieu in which communica- tion takes place [during interviews] modifies not only what a person dares to say but even what he thinks he chooses to say. And these variations in expression cannot be viewed as mere deviations from some underlying "true" opinion, for there is no neutral, non-social, uninfluenced situation to provide that baseline. (I? 192) Conceiving of the interview in this fash- ion casts interview participants as virtual practitioners of everyday life who work constantly to discern and designate the rec- ognizable and orderly features of the expe- rience under consideration. It transforms the subject behind the respondent from a repository of information and opinions or a wellspring of emotions into a productive source of knowledge. From the time a re- searcher identifies a research topic, through respondent selection, questioning and answering, and, finally, the interpreta- tion of responses, interviewing is a con- certed interactional project. Indeed, the subject behind the respondent now, more or less, becomes an imagined product of the project. Working within the interview it- self, subjects are fleshed out, rationally and emotionally, in relation to the give-and- take of the interview process, the inter- view's research purposes, and its surround- ing social contexts. Construed as active, the subject behind the respondent not only holds the details of a life's experience but, in the very process of offering them up to the interviewer, con- structively shapes the information. The ac- tive respondent can hardly "spoil" what he or she is, in effect, subjectively constructing in the interview process. Rather, the acti- vated subject pieces experiences together before, during, and after occupying the re- spondent role. This subject is always mak- ing meaning, regardless of whether he or she is actually being interviewed. An active subject behind the interviewer is also implicated in the production of knowledge. His or her participation in the process is not viewed in terms of standard- ization or constraint; neutrality is not fig- ured to be necessary or achievable. One cannot very well taint knowledge if that knowledge is not conceived as existing in some pure form apart from the circum- stances of its production. The active subject behind the interviewer thus becomes a nec- essary, practical counterpart to the active subject behind the respondent. Interviewer and, ultimately, researcher contributions to the information produced in interviews are not viewed asincidental or immaterial. Nor is interviewer participation considered in terms of contamination. Rather, the subject behind the interviewer is seen as actively and unavoidably engaged in the interac- tional co-construction of the interview's content. Interactional contingencies influence the construction of the active subjectivities of the interview. Especially important here are the varied subject positions articulated in the interview process, which need to be taken into account in the interpretation of interview material. For example, an inter- view project might center on the quality of care and quality of life of nursing home res- idents (see Gubrium 1993). This might be part of a study relating to the national de- bate about the organization and value of home versus institutional care. Careful at- tention to the way participants link sub- stantive matters with biographical ones can vividly reveal a highly active subject. For in- stance, a nursing home resident might speak animatedly during an interview about the quality of care in her facility, as- serting that, "for a woman, it ultimately gets down to feelings," invoking an emo- tional subject. Another resident might coolly and methodically list specifics about her facility's quality of care, never once mentioning her gender or her feelings about the care she receives. Offering her own take on the matter, this respondent might state that "getting emotional" over "these things" clouds clear judgment, im- plicating a rationalized subject. When re- searchers take this active subject into ac- count, what is otherwise a contradictory and inconclusive data set is transformed into the meaningful, intentionally crafted responses of quite active respondents. The standpoint from which information is offered continually unfolds in relation to ongoing interview interaction. In speaking of the quality of care, for example, nursing home residents, as interview respondents, not only offer substantive thoughts and feelings pertinent to the topic under con- 16 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 17 sideration but simultaneously and continu- ously monitor who they are in relation to themselves and to the person questioning them. For example, prefacing her remarks about the quality of life in her facility with the statement "Speaking as a woman," a nursing home resident actively informs the interviewer that she is to be heard as a woman, not as someone else-not a mere resident, cancer patient, or abandoned mother. If and when she subsequently com- ments, "If I were a man in this place," the resident frames her thoughts and feelings about the quality of life differently, produc- ing an alternative subject: the point of view of a man as spoken by a femalerespondent. The respondent is clearly working up expe- riential identities as the interview pro- gresses. Because the respondent's subjectivity and related experience are continually be- ing assembled and modified, the "truth" value of interview responses cannot be judged simply in terms of whether those re- sponses match what lies in an ostensibly ob- jective vessel of answers. Rather, the value of interview data liesboth in their meanings and in how meanings are constructed. These what and how matters go hand in hand, as two components of practical meaning-making action (see Gubrium and Holstein 1997). The entire process is fu- eled by the reality-constituting contribu- tions of all participants; interviewers, too, are similarly implicated in the co-construc- tion of the subject positions from which they ask the questions at hand (see in this volume Schaeffer and Maynard, Chapter 28; Briggs, Chapter 44). The multiple subjects that could possibly stand behind interview participants add several layers of complication to the inter- view process as well as to the analysis of interview data. Decidedly different proce- dural strictures are required to accommo- date and account for alternating subjects. Indeed, the very question of what consti- tutes or serves as data critically relates to these issues of subjectivity. What research- ers choose to highlight when they analyze interview responses flows directly from how the issues are addressed (see Gubrium and Holstein 1997; see also Baker, Chapter 37, this volume). + Empowering Respondents Reconceptualizing what it means to inter- view and to analyze interview material has led to far-reaching innovations in research (see the contributions to this volume by Fontana, Chapter 8; Riessman, Chapter 33; CAndida Smith, Chapter 34; Denzin, Chapter 40; Ellis and Berger, Chapter 41; Richardson, Chapter 42; Rosenblatt, Chapter 43). It has also promoted the view that the interview society is not only the by-product of statistically summarized sur- vey data, but is constituted by all manner of alternative interview encounters and infor- mation, the diverse agendas of which vari- ably enter into "data" production. In the process, the political dimensions of the in- terview process have been critically under- scored (see Briggs, Chapter 44, this vol- ume). The respondent's voice has taken on particular urgency, as we can hear in Eliot Mishler's (1986)poignant discussion of the empowerment of interview respondents. Uncomfortable with the evolution of the interview into a highly controlled, asym- metrical conversation dominated by the re- searcher (see Kahn and Cannell 1957; Maccoby and Maccoby 1954), Mishler challenges the assumptions and implica- tions behind the "standardized" interview. His aim is to bring the respondent more fully and actively into the picture, to make the respondent more of an equal partner in the interview conversation. Following a critique of standardized in- terviewing, Mishler (1986)offers a lengthy discussion of his alternative perspective, one that questions the need for strict con- trol of the interview encounter. The ap- proach, in part, echoes our discussion of the activation of interview participants. Mishler suggests that rather than conceiv- ing of the interview as a form of stimulus and response, we might better view it as an interactional accomplishment. Noting that interview participants not only ask and an- swer questions in interviews but simulta- neously engage in other speech activities, Mishler turns our attention to what the par- ticipants, in effect, are doing with words when they engage each other. He makes the point this way: Defining interviews as speech events or speech activities, as I do, marks the fun- damental contrast between the stan- dard antilinguistic, stimulus-response model and an alternative approach to interviewing as discourse between speakers. Different definitions in and of themselves do not constitute different practices. Nonetheless, this new defini- tion alerts us to the features of inter- views that hitherto have been ne- glected. (Pp. 35-36) The key phrase here is "discourse be- tween speakers." Mishler directs us to the integral and inexorable speech activities in which even survey interview participants engage as they ask and answer questions (see Schaeffer and Maynard, Chapter 28, this volume). Informed by a conversa- tion-analytic perspective (see Sacks 1992; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974), he points to the discursive machinery appar- ent in interview transcripts. Highlighting evidence of the ways the interviewer and the respondent mutually monitor each other's speech exchanges, Mishler shows how the participants ongoingly and jointly construct in words their senses of the devel- oping interview agenda. He notes, for ex- ample, that even token responses by the in- terviewer, such as "Hm hm," can serve as confirmatory markers that the respondent is on the "right" track for interview pur- poses. But, interestingly enough, not much can be done to eliminate even token re- sponses, given that a fundamental rule of conversational exchange is that turns must be taken in the unfolding interview process. To eliminate even tokens or to refuse to take one's turn, however minimally, is, in effect, to stop the conversation, hence the interview. The dilemma here is striking in that it points to the practical need for inter- view participants to be linguistically ani- mated, not just standardized and passive, in order to complete the interview conversa- tion. It goes without saying that this intro- duces us to a pair of subjects behind the in- terviewer and the respondent who are more conversationally active than standardiza- tion would imply, let alone tolerate. Fol- lowing a number of conversation-analytic and linguistic arguments (Cicourel 1967, 1982; Gumperz 1982; Hymes 1967; Sacks et al. 1974), Mishler (1986) explains that each and every point in the series of speech exchanges that constitute an interview is, in effect, open to interactional work, activity that constructs communicative sense out of the participants aswell as the subject matter under consideration. Thus, in contrast to the modeled asymmetry of the standard- ized interview, there is considerable com- municative equality and interdependence in the speech activities of all interviewing, where participants invariably engage in the '"joint construction of meaning," no matter how asymmetrical the informing model might seem: The discourse of the interview is jointly constructed by interviewer and respon- dent. ...Both questions and responses are formulated in, developed through, and shaped by the discourse between interviewers and respondents. . . . An adequate understanding of interviews depends on recognizing how interview- ers reformulate questions and how re- spondents frame answers in terms of their reciprocal understanding as meanings emerge during the course of an interview. (l?52) 18 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 19 THE ISSUE OF "OWNING" NARRATIVE Mishler's entry into the linguistic and conversation-analytic fray was fundamen- tally motivated by his desire to valorize the respondent's perspective and experience. This was, to some extent, a product of Mishler's long-standing professional inter- est in humanizing the doctor-patient en- counter. His earlier book The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews (1984) is important in that it shows how medical interviews can unwittingly but sys- tematically abrogate the patient's sense of his or her own illness even in the sincerest doctor's search for medical knowledge. As an alternative, Mishler advocates more open-ended questions, minimal interrup- tions of patient accounts, and the use of pa- tients' own linguistic formulations to en- courage their own articulations of illness. Similarly, in the context of the research in- terview, Mishler urges us to consider ways that interviewing might be designed so that the respondent's voice comes through in greater detail, as a way of paying greater at- tention to respondent relevancies. According to Mishler, this turns us forthrightly to respondents' stories. His view is that experience comes to us in the form of narratives. When we communicate our experiences to each other, we do so by storying them. When, in turn, we encour- age elaboration, we commonly use such narrative devices as "Go on" and "Then what happened?" to prompt further storylike communication. It would be diffi- cult to imagine how an experience of any kind could be conveyed except in narrative format, in terms that structure events into distinct plots, themes, and forms of charac- terization. Consequently, according to this view, we must leave our research efforts open to respondents' stories if we are to un- derstand respondents' experiences in, and on, their own terms, leading to less formal control in the interview process. Applied to the research interview, the "radical transformation of the traditional approach to interviewing" (Mishler 1986:117)serves to empower respondents. This resonates with a broadening concern with what is increasingly referred to as the respondent's own voice or authentic story (see the contributions to this volume by Platt, Chapter 2; Warren, Chapter 4; Fontana, Chapter 8; Riessman, Chapter 33; Ellis and Berger, Chapter 41).Although story, narrative, and the respondent's voice are the leading terms of reference, an equally key, yet unexplicated, usage is the term own. It appears throughout Mishler's discussion of empowerment, yet he gives it hardly any attention. Consider several applications of the term own in Mishler's (1986) research in- terviewing text. In introducing a chapter ti- tled "The Empowerment of Respondents," he writes, "I will be concerned primarily with the impact of different forms of prac- tice on respondents' modes of understand- ing themselves and the world, on the possi- bility of their acting in terms of their own interests, on social scientists' ways of work- ing and theorizing, and the social functions of scientific knowledge" (pp. 117-18; em- phasis added). Further along, Mishler ex- plains, "Various attempts to restructure the interviewee-interviewer relationship so as to empower respondents are designed to encourage them to find and speak in their own 'voices' " (p. 118; emphasis added). Finally, in pointing to the political potential of narrative, Mishler boldly flags the own- ership in question: "To be empowered is not only to speak in one's own voice and to tell one's own story, but to apply the under- standing arrived at to action in accord with one's own interests" (p. 119; emphasis added). Mishler is admittedly being persuasive. Just as in his earlier book on medical inter- views he encourages what Michael Balint (1964) and others (see Silverman 1987; Zoppi and Epstein, Chapter 18, this vol- ume) have come to call patient-centered medicine, in his research interview book he advocateswhat might be called respondent- centered research. Mishler constructs a pre- ferred version of the subject behind the re- spondent, one that allegedly gives voice to the respondent's own story. The image is one of a respondent who owns his or her experience, who, on his or her own, can narrate the story if given the opportunity. It is a story that is uniquely the respondent's in that only his or her own voice can articu- late it authentically; any other voice or for- mat would apparently detract from what this subject behind the respondent more genuinely and competently does on his or her own. Procedurally, the point is to pro- vide the narrative opportunity for this ownership to be expressed, to reveal what presumably lies within. But valorizing the individual's owner- ship of his or her story is a mere step away from seeing the subject as a vessel of an- swers. As we discussed earlier, this subject is passive and, wittingly or not, taken to be a mere repository of information, opinion, and sentiment. More subtly, perhaps, the subject behind the respondent who "owns" his or her story is viewed as virtually pos- sessing what we seek to know about. Mishler's advice is that we provide respon- dents with the opportunity to convey these stories to us on their own terms rather than deploy predesignated categories or other structured formats for doing so. This, Mishler claims, empowers respondents. Nevertheless, the passive vessel of an- swers is still there in its essential detail. It is now more deeply embedded in the subject, perhaps, but it is as passively secured in the inner reaches of the respondent as the ves- sel informing the survey respondent's sub- jectivity (see Johnson, Chapter 5, this vol- ume).We might say that the subject behind the standardized interview respondent is a highly rationalized version of the romanti- cized subject envisioned by Mishler, one who harbors his or her own story. Both vi- sions are rhetorics of subjectivity that have historically been used to account for the "truths" of experience. Indeed, we might say that the standardized interview pro- duces a different narrative of experience than does the empowered interviewing stylethat Mishler and others advocate. This is not meant to disparage, but only to point out that when the question of subjectivity is raised, the resulting complications of the interview are as epistemological as they are invidious. It is important to emphasize that the ownership in question results from a pre- ferred subjectivity,not from an experiential subject that is more essential than all other subjects. It is, as Silverman and his associ- ates remind us, a romanticized discourse of its own and, although it has contributed im- mensely to our understanding of the variety of "others" we can be, it does not empower absolutely (see Silverman 1987, 1993; Atkinson and Silverman 1997). Rather, it empowers in relation to the kinds of stories that one can ostensibly own, that would seem to be genuine, or that are otherwise accountably recognized as fitting or au- thentic to oneself in the particular times and places they are conveyed. A DISCOURSE OF EMPOWERMENT Invoking a discourse of empowerment is a way of giving both rhetorical and practi- cal spin to how we conduct interviews. Like all discourses, the discourse of individual empowerment deploys preferred terms of reference. For example, in the discourse of the standardized survey interview, the in- terview encounter is asymmetrical and the operating principle is control. Participants have different functions: One side asks questions and records information, and the other side provides answers to the ques- tions asked. Procedurally, the matter of control is centered on keeping these func- tions and their roles separate. Accordingly, an important operating rule is that the in- terviewer does not provide answers or offer opinions. Conversely, the respondent is en- couraged to answer questions, not ask them. Above all, the language of the enter- prise locates knowledge within the respon- dent, but control restswith the interviewer. 20 + INTRODUCTION From the Individlla1 Interview to the Interview Society + 21 The terms of reference change signifi- cantly when the interview is more symmet- rical or, as Mishler puts it, when the respon- dent is empowered. The interviewer and respondent are referred to jointly as inter- view participants, highlighting their collec- tive contribution to the enterprise. This works against asymmetry, emphasizing a more fundamental sense of the shared task at hand, which now becomes a form of "collaboration" in the production of mean- ing. One procedure for setting this tone is to make it clear that all participants in the interview can effectively raise questions re- lated to the topics under consideration. Equally important, everyone should under- stand that answers are not meant to be con- clusive but instead serve to further the agenda for discussion. The result, then, is more of a team effort, rather than a division of labor, even though the discourse of em- powerment still aims to put the narrative ball in the respondent's court, so to speak. Assiduously concerned with the need to "redistribute power" in the interview en- counter, Mishler (1986) argues compel- lingly for the more equalized relationship he envisions. Seeking a redefinition of roles, he describes what he has in mind: These types of role redefinitions may be characterized briefly by the following terms referring respectively to the rela- tionship between interviewee and in- terviewer as informant and reporter, as research collaborators, and as learner1 actor and advocate. Taking on the roles of each successive pair in this series involves a more comprehensive and more radical transformation of the power relationship inherent in tradi- tional roles, and each succeeding pair of roles relies on and absorbs the earlier one. (Pp. 122-23) The use of the prefix co- is commonplace in such discussions, further signaling symme- try. Participants often become "copartici- pants" and, of course, the word collabora- tion speaks for itself in this context. Some authors even refer to the interview encoun- ter as a "conversational partnership" (Rubin and Rubin 1995). Mishler's discourse of collaboration and empowerment extends to the representa- tion of interview material, taking co- into new territory. In discussing the role of the advocate, for instance, Mishler describes Kai Erikson's (1976)activity as a researcher hired by attorneys representing the resi- dents affected by the 1972 dam collapse in the Buffalo Creek valley of West Virginia. Erikson was advocating for the surviving residents, several of whom he interviewed, but not the local coal company from which they were seeking damages. The researcher and the sponsor clearly collaborated with each other in representing interview mate- rials. Others are not as forthrightly political in their corepresentations. Laurel Richardson (see Chapter 42, this volume), for example, discusses alternative textual choices in rela- tion to the presentation of the respondent's "own" story. Research interviews, she re- minds us, are usually conducted for re- search audiences. Whether they are closed- or open-ended, the questions and answers are formulated with the analyticinterests of researchers in mind. Sociologists, for ex- ample, may wish to consider how gender, race, or class background shapes respon- dents' opinions, so they will tailor ques- tions and interpret answers in these terms. Ultimately, researchers will represent inter- view material in the frameworks and lan- guages of their research concerns and in disciplinary terms. But, as Richardson points out, respondents might not figure that their experiences or opinions are best understood that way. Additionally, Rich- ardson asks us whether the process of cod- ing interview responses for research pur- poses itself disenfranchises respondents, transforming their narratives into terms foreign to what their original sensibilities might have been (see also Briggs, Chapter 44, this volume). Richardson suggests that a radically dif- ferent textual form can help us to represent the respondent's experience more inven- tively, and authentically. Using poetry rather than prose, for example, capitalizes on poetry's culturally understood role of evoking and making meaning, not just con- veying it. This extends to poetry's alleged capacity to communicate meaning where prose is said to be inadequate, in the way that folk poetry is used in some quarters to represent the ineffable (see Gubrium 1988). It is not uncommon, for instance, for individuals to say that plain words can't convey what they mean or that they simply cannot put certain experiences into words, something that, ironically, poetry might ac- complish in poetic terms. How, then, are such experiences and their opinions to be communicated in inter- views? Must some respondents literally sing the blues, for example, as folks tradi- tionally have done in the rural South of the United States?Should some experiences be "performed," rather than simply translated into text? Do mere retelling of others' ex- periences compromise the ability of those who experience them to convey the "scenic presence" of the actual experiences in their lives?A number of researchers take such is- sues to heart and have been experimenting, for several years now, with alternative rep- resentational forms that they believe can convey respondents' experience more on, if not in, their own terms (see Clifford and Marcus 1986;Ellis and Flaherty 1992;Ellis and Bochner 1996; Reed-Danahay 1997; see also in this volume Fontana, Chapter 8; Ellis and Berger, Chapter 41). The border between fact and fiction itself is being ex- plored for its empowering capacity, taking empowerment's informing discourse firmly into the realm of literature (see Rosenblatt, Chapter 43, this volume). + Voiceand Ownership When we empower the respondent (or the informing coparticipant) in the interview encounter, we establish a space for the re- spondent's own story to be heard-at least this is the reasoning behind Mishler's and others' aims in this regard. But questions do arise in relation to the voices we listen to when we provide respondents the opportu- nity to convey their own stories. Whose voices do we hear?From where do respon- dents obtain the material they communi- cate to us in interviews?Is there always only one story for a given respondent to tell, or can there be several to choose from? If the latter, the question can become, Which among these is most tellable under the cir- cumstances? And, as if these questions weren't challenging enough, do the queries themselves presume that they are answer- able in straightforward terms, or do an- swers to them turn in different directions and get worked out in the very course of the interview in narrative practice? SUBJECT POSITIONS AND RELATED VOICES An anecdote from Jaber Gubrium's doc- toral supervision duties speaks to the heart of these issues. Gubrium was serving on the dissertation committee of a graduate stu- dent who was researching substance abuse among pharmacists. The student was espe- cially keen to allow the pharmacists being interviewed to convey in their own words their experiences of illicitly using drugs, seeking help for their habits, and going through rehabilitation. He hoped to under- stand how those who "should know better" would account for what happened to them. When the interviews were completed, the student analyzed the interview data the- matically and presented the themes in the dissertation along with individual accounts of experience. Interestingly, several of the themes identified in the pharmacists' sto- ries closely paralleled the familiar recovery rubrics of self-help groups such as Alco- holics Anonymous (A.A.) and Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.). Gubrium noted this, and it turned out that many, if not all, of the pharmacists had participated in these re- 22 4 INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society 4 23 covery groups and evidently had incorpo- rated the groups' ways of narrating the sub- stance abuse experience into their "own" stories. For example, respondents spoke of the experience of "hitting bottom" and or- ganized the trajectory of the recovery pro- cess in relation to that very important low point in their lives. Gubrium raised the is- sue of the extent to which the interview ma- terial could be analyzed as the pharmacists' "own" stories as opposed to the stories of these recovery programs. At a doctoral committee meeting, he asked, "Whose voice do we hear when these pharmacists tell their stories?Their own or N.A.'s?" He asked, in effect, whether the stories be- longed to these individuals or to the organi- zations that promulgated their discourse. The issue of voice is important because it points to the subject who is assumed to be responding in interviews (Gubrium 1993; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Voice refer- ences the subject position that is taken for granted behind speech. Voice works at the level of everyday life, whereas subject posi- tions are what we imagine to be their oper- ating standpoints. This is the working side of our earlier discussion of the subjects be- hind interview participants. The possibility of alternative voicings and varied subject positions turned researchers' attention to concerns such as how interview partici- pants collaborate to construct the inter- view's shifting subjectivities in relation to the topics under consideration. Empirically, the concept of voice leads us to the question of who-or what subject -speaks over the course of an interview and from what standpoint. For example, does a 50-year-old man offer the opinions of a "professional" at the apex of his suc- cessful career, or might his voice be that of a husband and father reflecting on what he has missed as a result in the way of family life? Or will he speak as a church elder, a novice airplane pilot, or the "enabling" brother of an alcoholic as the interview un- folds? All of these are possible, given the range of contemporary experiences that he could call upon to account for his opinions. At the same time, it is important to enter- tain the possibility that the respondent's subjectivity and variable voices emerge out of the immediate interview's interaction and are not necessarily preformed in the re- spondent's ostensible vessel of answers. In- deed, topics raised in the interview may in- cite respondents to voice subjectivities never contemplated before. As noted earlier, at times one can actu- ally hear interview participants indicate subject positions. Verbal prefaces, for ex- ample, can provide clues to subject position and voice, but they are often ignored in in- terview research. Phrases such as "to put myself in someone else's shoes" and "to put on a different hat" are signals that respon- dents employ to voice shifts in position. Ac- knowledging this, in an interview study of nurses on the qualities of good infant care, we probably would not be surprised to hear a respondent say something like, "That's when I have my RN cap on, but as a mother, I might tell you a different story." Some- times respondents are quite forthright in giving voice to alternative points of view in precisely those terms, aswhen a respondent prefaces remarks with, say, "Well, from the point of view of a . ..."Suchphrases are not interview debris; they convey the impor- tant and persistent subjective work of the interview encounter. In the actual practice of asking interview questions and giving answers, things are seldom so straightforward, however. An in- terview, for example, might start under the assumption that a father or a mother is be- ing interviewed, which the interview's in- troductions might appear to confirm. But there is no guarantee that particular sub- jectivities will prevail throughout. There's the matter of the ongoing construction of subjectivity, which unfolds with the give-and-take of the interview encounter. Something said later in the interview, for example, might prompt the respondent to figure, not necessarily audibly, that he re- ally had, "all along," been responding from a quite different point of view than was evi- dent at the start. Unfortunately, shifts in subjectivity are not always evident in so many words or comments. Indeed, the pos- sibility of an unforeseen change in subjec- tivity might not be evident until the very end of an interview, if at all, when a respon- dent remarks for the first time, "Yeah, that's the way all of us who were raised down South do with our children," making it un- clear which subject had been providing re- sponsesto the interviewer's questions-the voice of this individual parent or her re- gional membership and its associated expe- riential sensibilities. Adding to these complications, subject position and voice must also be considered in relation to the perceived voice of the in- terviewer. Who, after all, is the interviewer in the eyes of the respondent?How will the interviewer role be positioned into the con- versational matrix? For example, respon- dents in debriefings might comment that an interviewer sounded more like a company man than a human being, or that a particu- lar interviewer made the respondent feel that the interviewer was "just an ordinary person, like myself." Indeed, even issues of social justice might creep in and position the interviewer, say, as a worthless hack, as the respondent takes the interviewer to be "just one more token of the establishment," choosing to silence her own voice in the process (see Dunbar, Rodriguez, and Parker, Chapter 14, this volume). This raises the possibility that the respondent's working subjectivity is constructed out of the unfolding interpersonal reflections of the interview participants' attendant his- torical experiences. It opens to consider- ation, for example, an important question: If the interviewee had not been figured to be just an "ordinary" respondent, who (which subject) might the respondent have been in givingvoice to his or her opinions? As if this doesn't muddy the interview waters enough, imagine what the acknowl- edgment of multiple subjectivities does to the concept of sample size, another dimen- sion figured to be under considerable con- trol in traditional interview research. To decompose the designated respondent into his or her (multiple) working subjects is to raise the possibility that any single element of a sample can expand or contract in size in the course of the interview, increasing or decreasing the sample n accordingly. Treating subject positions and their associ- ated voices seriously, we might find that an ostensibly single interview could actually be, in practice, an interview with several subjects, whose particular identities may be only partially clear. Under the circum- stances, to be satisfied that one has com- pleted an interview with a single respon- dent and to code it as such because it was formally conducted with a single embodied individual is to be rather cavalier about the complications of subjectivity and of the narrative organization of sample size. As Mishler (1986)has pointed out, such matters have traditionally been treated as technical issues in interview research. Still, they have long been informally recognized, and an astute positivistic version of the complexities entailed has been theorized and researched with great care and insight (see, for example, Fishbein 1967). Jean Converse and Howard Schuman's (1974) delightful book on survey research as inter- viewers see it, for instance, illuminates this recognition with intriguing case material. There is ample reason, then, for some re- searchers to approach the interview as a set of activities that are ongoingly accom- plished, not just completed. In standard- ized interviewing, one would need to settle conclusively on matters of who the subject behind the respondent is, lest it be impossi- ble to know to which population general- izations can be made. Indeed, a respondent who shifts the subject to whom she is giving voice would pose dramatic technical diffi- culties for survey researchers, such that, for example, varied parts of a single completed interviewwould have to be coded as the re- sponses of different subjects and be generalizable to different populations. This takes us well beyond the possibility of cod- ing in the traditional sense of the term, a point that, of course, Harold Garfinkel (1967)and Aaron Cicourel (1964), among 24 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 25 others, made years ago and that, oddly enough, inspired the approach Mishler ad- vocates. OWNERSHIP AND EMPOWERMENT Having raised these vexing issues, can we ever effectively address the question of who owns the opinions and stories ex- pressed in interviews, including both the standardized interview and the more open- ended, narrative form?Whose "own" story do we obtain in the process of interview- ing?Can we ever discern ownership in indi- vidual terms? And how does this relate to respondent empowerment? Recall that ownership implies that the respondent has, or has title to, a story and that the interview can be designed to bring this forth. But the concept of voice suggests that this is not as straightforward as it might seem. The very activity of opening the in- terview to extended discussion among the participants indicates that ownership can be a joint or collaborative matter, if not rather fleeting in designation. In practice, the idea of "own story" is not just a com- mendable research goal but something par- ticipants themselves seek to resolve as they move through the interview conversation. Each participant tentatively engages the in- teractive problems of ownership as away of sorting out the assumed subjectivities in question and proceeds on that basis, for the practical communicative purposes of com- pleting the interview. When a respondent such as a substance- abusing pharmacist responds to a question about the future, "I've learned [from N.A.] that it's best to take it one day at a time; I re- ally believe that," it is clear that the phar- macist's narrative is more than an individ- ual's story. What he owns would seem to have wended its way through the informing voices of other subjectivities: Narcotics Anonymous's recovery ideology, this par- ticular respondent's articulation of that ideology, the communicative twists on both discourses that emerge in the give-and-take of the interview exchange, the project's own framing of the issues and resulting agenda of questions, the interviewer's on- going articulation of that agenda, and the reflexively collaborative flow of unfore- seen voiced and unvoiced subjectivities op- erating in the unfolding exchange. What's more, all of these together can raise meta- communicative concerns about "what this [the interview] is all about, anyway," which the respondent might ask at any time. Un- der the circumstances, it would seem that ownership is something rather diffusely spread about the topical and processual landscape of speech activities entailed in the interview. Respondent empowerment would ap- pear to be aworking, rather than definitive, feature of these speech activities. It is not clear in practice how one could distinguish any one respondent's own story from the tellable stories available to this and other respondents, which they might more or less share. Putting it in terms of "tellable sto- ries" further complicates voice, subjectiv- ity, and empowerment. And, at the other end of the spectrum of what is tellable, there are those perplexing responses that, in the respondent's search for help in for- mulating an answer, can return "power" to the very source that would hold it in the first place. It is not uncommon to hear re- spondents remark that they are not sure how they feel or what they think, or that they haven't really thought about the ques- tion or topic before, or to hear them actu- ally think out loud about what it might mean personally to convey particular senti- ments or answer in a specific way-and ask the interviewer for assistance in doing so. Philosophically, the central issue here is a version of Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1953) "private language" problem. Wittgenstein argues that because language-and, by im- plication, stories and other interview re- sponses-is a shared "form of life," the idea that one could have available exclusively to oneself an unshared, private language would not make much sense. Given the re- flexive duality of self-consciousness, one could not even share an ostensible private language with oneself. In more practical terms, this means that whatever is con- veyed by the respondent to the interviewer is always subject to the question of what it means, in which case we're back to square one with shared knowledge and the various "language games" that can be collabor- atively engaged by interview participants to assign meaning to these questions and re- sponses. Empowerment in this context is not so much a matter of providing the com- municative means for the respondent to tell his or her "own" story as it is a matter of recognizing, first, that responses or stories, as the case might be, are collaborative ac- complishments and, second, that there are as many individual responses or stories to tell as there are recognizable forms of re- sponse. This, of course, ultimately brings us full circle to the analytically hoary problem of whose interests are being served when the individually "empowered" respondent speaks, implicating power in relation to the broader social horizons of speech and dis- course. Kirin Narayan and Kenneth George (Chapter39, this volume) inform us further that empowerment is also a cultural prerog- ative, something that the interviewer does not expressly control and, given the oppor- tunity, cannot simply choose to put into ef- fect. Cultures of storytelling enter into the decision as to whether there is even a story to convey or relevant experiences to high- light. Although the democratization of opinion potentially turns interviewers to- ward any and all individuals for their ac- counts, not all individuals believe that their opinions are worthy of communication. The Asian Indian women Narayan inter- viewed, for example, did not think they had opinionsworth telling unless they had done "something different" with their lives. It had to be something "special"; as one woman put it, "You ate, drank, slept, served your husband and brought up your chil- dren. What's the story in that?" This powerfully affected the stories that were heard in the area, tying ownership to the lo- cal relevance of one's narrative resources. GOING CONCERNS AND DISCURSWE ENVIRONMENTS Where do tellable stories and other forms of response come from if they are not owned by individuals? How do they figure in what is said in interview situations? It was evident in the previous discussion of the pharmacist drug abuse research that re- spondents were making use of a very com- mon notion of recovery in today's world, one that seems to have percolated through the entire troubles treatment industry (Gubrium and Holstein 2001). Do this in- dustry and other institutions dealing with human experiences offer us a clue to the question of narrative ownership? Do Narayan's respondents proffer agendas of social, not just individual, relevance? Erving Goffman's (1961) exploration of what he calls "moral careers" provides a point of departure for addressing such questions. Goffman was especially con- cerned with the moral careers of stigma- tized persons such as mental patients, but the social concerns of his approach are broadly suggestive. In his reckoning, each of us has many selves and associated ways of accounting for our thoughts and actions. According to Goffman, individuals obtain senses of who they are as they move through the various moral environments that offer specificationsfor identity. A men- tal hospital, for example, provides patients with particular selves, including ways of presenting who one is, one's past, and one's future. The moral environment of the men- tal hospital also provides others, such as staff members, acquaintances, and even strangers, with parallel sensibilities toward the patient. In other words, moral environ- ments deploy localized universes of choice 26 + INTRODUCTION From the Individua1 Interview to the Interview Society + 27 for constructing subjectivity, relatedly pro- viding a shared format for voicing partici- pants' selves, thoughts, and feelings. Goffman's view is not so much that these environmentsgovern who and what people are as individuals, but that individuals- everyday actors-strategically play out who and what they are as the moral agents of particular circumstances. Goffman is mainly concerned with the face-to-face situations that constitute daily life; he is less concerned with institutional matters. Still, his analysis of moral careers in relation to what he calls "total institu- tions" points us in an important direction, toward what Everett Hughes ([I94211984) calls the "going concerns" of today's world. This is Hughes's way of emphasizing that institutions are not only concerns in having formal and informal mandates; they are so- cial forms that ongoingly provide distinct patterning for our thoughts, words, senti- ments, and actions. From the myriad formal organizations in which we work, study, pray, play, and re- cover to the countlessinformal associations and networks to which we belong, to our affiliations with racial, ethnic, and gen- dered groupings, we engage a panoply of going concerns on a daily basis. Taken to- gether, they set the "conditions of possibil- ity" (Foucault 1988)for identity-for who and what we could possibly be. Many of these going concerns explicitly structure or reconfigure personal identity. All variety of human service agencies, for example, readily delve into the deepest enclaves of the self in order to ameliorate personal ills. Self-help organizations seem to crop up on every street corner, and self-help literature beckons us from the book spindles of su- permarkets and the shelves of every book- store. "Psychobabble" on radio and TV talk shows constantly prompts us to formulate (orreformulate)who and what we are, urg- ing us to give voice to the selves we live by. The self is increasingly deprivatized (even if it never was private in Wittgenstein's terms in the first place), constructed and inter- preted under the auspices of these decid- edly public going concerns (Gubrium and Holstein 1995, 2000; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). Since early in the 20th century, social life has come into the purview of countless in- stitutions whose moral function is to as- semble, alter, and reformulate our lives and selves (see Gubrium and Holstein 2001). We refer to these as discursive environ- ments because they provide choices for how we articulate our lives and selves. Dis- cursive environments are interactional do- mains characterized by distinctive ways of interpreting and representing everyday life, of speaking aboutwho and what we are. In- stitutions such as schools, correctional fa- cilities, clinics, family courts, support groups, recreational clubs, fitness centers, and self-improvement programs promote particular ways of speaking of life. They are families of language games, as it were, for formulating our opinions. They furnish dis- courses of subjectivity that are accountably put into discursive practice as individuals give voice to experience, such as they are now widely asked to do in interviews. These going concerns pose new chal- lenges to the concept of the individual re- spondent, to voice, and to the idea of em- powerment. They are not especially hostile to the personal; indeed, they are often in the business of reconstructing the personal from the ground up. Rather, today's varie- gated landscape of discursive environments provides complex options for who we could be, the conditions of possibility we mentioned earlier. This is the world of mul- tiple subjects and of ways to give voice to them that respondents now increasingly bring with them into interviews, whose dis- cursive resources also figure significantly in marking narrative relevance. In turn, these environments also provide the source of socially relevant questions that interviewers pose to respondents. Those who conduct surveys, for example, are often sponsored by the very agents who formulate these applicable discourses. The collaborative production of the respon- dent's own story is therefore shaped, for better or worse, in response to markets and concerns spread well beyond the give- and-take of the individual interview con- versation. This brings us back, full circle, to the in- terview society. The research context is not the only place in which we are asked inter- view questions. All the going concerns mentioned above and more are in the inter- viewing business, all constructing and mar- shaling the subjects they need to do their work. Each ~rovidesa social context for narrative practice, for the collaborative production of the identities and experi- ences that come to be viewed as the moral equivalents of respondents and interview responses. Medical clinics deploy inter- views and, in the process, assemble doctors, patients, and their illnesses (see Zoppi and Epstein, Chapter 18, this volume). Person- nel officers interview job applicants and collect information that forms the basis for employment decisions (see Latham and Millman, Chapter 23, this volume). Thera- pists of all stripes conduct counseling in- terviews, and now increasingly assemble narrative plots of experiences, which are grounds for further rehabilitative inter- viewing (see Miller et al., Chapter 19, this volume). The same is true for schools, fo- rensic investigation, and journalistic in- terviewing, among the broad range of in- stitutional contexts that shape our lives through their collaborative speech activi- ties (see in this volume Altheide, Chapter 20; McKenzie, Chapter 21; Tierney and Dilley, Chapter 22). The interview society expands the insti- tutional auspices of interviewing well be- yond the research context. Indeed, it would have been mistakenly restrictive to limit the purview of this Handbook to the research interview alone. Social research is only one of the many sites where subjectivities and the voicing of individual experience are un- dertaken. What's more, these various going concerns cannot be considered to be inde- pendent of one another. As our pharmacist anecdote suggests, the discursive environ- ments of therapy and recovery can be brought directly into the research inter- view, serving to commingle an agglomer- ation of institutional voices. Interview formats are themselves going concerns. The group interview, for exam- ple, can take us into a veritable swirl of sub- ject formations and opinion construction, as participants share and make use of narra- tive material from a broader range of dis- cursive environments than any single one of them might muster to account for his or her experience alone (seeMorgan, Chapter 7, this volume). Life story and oral history interviews extend the biographical particu- lars of the subject and subject matter in time, producing respondents who are in- cited to trace opinion from early to late life and across eras, something that can be amazingly convoluted when compared to the commonly detemporalized informa- tion elicited from cross-sectional survey re- spondents (see in this volume Atkinson, Chapter 6; Cgndida Smith, Chapter 34). The in-depth interview extends experience in emotional terms, affectively elaborating the subject (see Johnson, Chapter 5, this volume). Identity politics, too, forms going con- cerns. Although we now might consider that both men and women are proper sub- jects for interviews, the contributions to this volume on men as respondents, by Mi- chael Schwalbe and Michelle Wolkomir (Chapter lo), and on women as respon- dents, by Shulamit Reinharz and Susan Chase (Chapter ll), present men and women as "distinctly" historical, if not po- litical, subjects. The idea of interviewing men as men, for example, and not simply assuming that they are general respon- dents, is of recent vintage, and undoubtedly also is a gendered political response to fem- inist self-consciousness, according to Schwalbe and Wolkomir. The same can be said for the other "distinctive" respondents discussed in Part I1 of this Handbook. The point here is that, whether responses give voice, say, to children as such, or to gays and lesbians, particular ethnic and racial groups, older ~eople,social elites, or the se- 28 + INTRODUCTION From the Individua1 Interview to the Interview Society + 29 riously ill, they are products of the rubrics we bring to bear in prompting ourselves or in being prompted by others to give voice to experience, not just the products of indi- vidual empowerment. + Artfulness and Narrative Practice Lest we socially overdetermine subjectivity, it is important to emphasize that the prac- tice of interviewing does not simply incor- porate wholesale the identitiesproffered by institutionalized concerns and cultural rel- evancies. Interview participants themselves are actively involved in how these subjectivities are put into play. Although varied institutional auspicesprovide partic- ular resources for asking and answering questions, prescribe the roles played by in- terview participants, and privilege certain accounts, interview participants do not be- have like robots and adopt and reproduce these resources and roles in their speech ac- tivities. If participants are accountable to particular circumstances, such as job inter- views, medical diagnostic encounters, or journalistic interviews, they nonetheless borrow from the variety of narrative re- sources available to them. In this regard, they are more "artful" (Garfinkel 1967) than automatic in realizing their respective roles and voices. This extends to all inter- view participants, as both interviewers and respondents collaboratively assemble who and what they are in narrative practice. Our pharmacist anecdote is an impor- tant case in point. Although the interviews in question were formal research encoun- ters, it was evident that respondents were not only reporting their "own" experi- ences, but were interpolating their "own" stories, in part, in N.A. recovery terms. They drew from their experiences in recov- ery groups to convey to the interviewer what it felt like to be "taken over" by drugs. Several respondents used the familiar meta- phor of "hitting bottom" to convey a trajectory for the experience. But these re- spondents were not simply mouthpieces for Narcotics Anonymous; they gave their own individual spins to the terminology, which, in turn, were selectively applied in their responses. For example, "hitting bot- tom" meant different things to different re- spondents, depending on the biographical particulars of their lives. How hitting bot- tom narratively figured in one respondent's comments was no guarantee of how it might figure in another's. Interviewers, too, are artful in coordi- nating the interview process, even in the context of the standardized survey, which employs rather formalized procedures (see in this volume Schaeffer and Maynard, Chapter 28; Baker, Chapter 37). In some forms of interviewing, such as in-depth in- terviews, interviewers may use all of the personal narrative resources at their dis- posal to establish open and trusting rela- tionships with respondents (see Johnson, Chapter 5, this volume). This may involve extensive self-disclosure, following on the assumption that reciprocal self-disclosure is likely. Taking this a step farther, a growing postmodern trend in interviewing deliber- ately blurs the line between the interviewer and the respondent, moving beyond sym- metry to a considerable overlap of roles (see Fontana, Chapter 8, this volume). Al- though this may have been characteristic of in-depth interviewing for years, post- modern sensibilities aim for an associated representational inventiveness as much as deep disclosure. Artfulness extends to the representation of interviewers' and re- searchers' own reflective collaborations in moving from respondent to respondent as the project develops, as Carolyn Ellis and Leigh Berger show in their contribution to this volume (Chapter41). Of course, inter- viewers and their sponsoring researchers have always collaborated on the design of interviews and offered collaborative feed- back to one another on the interview pro- cess. But there is a distinct difference here: Ellis and Berger choose not to separate this from their interview materials. In layered writing, they provide us with an intriguing account of how interviewers interviewing each other artfully and fruitfully combine the interview "data" with their own related life experiences to broaden and enrich the results. Their reflections collaboratively impel them forward to complete additional interviews and revisit old ones in new and interestingways. The separation in conven- tional research reports of interviewers' ex- periences from those of respondents, they argue, is highly artificial and produces sani- tized portrayals of the "data" in question. According to Ellis and Berger, researchers may capture collaborative richness by forthrightly presenting the full round of narrative practices that generate responses. Artfulness derives from the interpretive work that is undertaken in mingling to- gether what interviewers draw upon to make meaning in the interview process and what respondents themselves bring along. Further blurring boundaries, Narayan and George (Chapter 39, this volume) pro- vide a delightful jaunt through the artful re- lationship between what they call personal narratives and folk narratives. The former allegedly are the idiosyncratic individual stories that anthropologists regularly en- counter in their fieldwork, accounts of ex- perience considered to be peculiar to their storytellers. Folk narratives, in contrast, are ostensibly those shared tales of experience common to a group or culture. They are part of the narrative tradition and, in their telling, are a cultural accounting of the ex- periences in question. But, as Narayan and George explain, in their respective at- tempts to obtain life stories from respon- dents in various parts of the globe, what was personal and what was folk was never clearly demarcated. Individual respondents made use of what was shared to represent themselves as individuals, so that, narra- tively, who any "one" was, was mediated artfully by various applications of common usage. In turn, the cultural particulars em- bodied in folktales were constantly being applied in both old and new ways in per- sonal accounts. Biography and culture, in other words, were mutually implicative and alive in their narrative renderings; their interviews both reproduced and in- vented participants' lives (see also Abu- Lughod 1993; Behar 1993; Degh 1969; Narayan 1997). In some sense, then, although the aim of empowering respondents is certainly at- tractive and to be encouraged in principle, interview participants are always already "empowered" to engage artfully in a vast range of discursive practices. Even "asym- metrical" interview conversations require the active involvement of both parties. Al- though interview preferences and politics move in various directions, interview par- ticipants nonetheless actively and artfully engage the auspices of the interview and their own biographies at many levels. As Foucault might put it, power is everywhere in the interview's exploration and explica- tion of experience. Even the standardized survey interview, which seemingly allocates all power to the researcher, deploys it else- where in the collaboratively constructive vocalization of "individual" opinion. + Interviewing as Cultural Production The interview is certainly more than what it seemed to be at the start of this chapter; we have taken it well beyond a simple and self-evident encounter between inter- viewer and respondent. As we moved from the individual interview to the interview society, we noted that the interview is among our most commonplace means for constructing individualized experience.We recognized, too, that by virtue of our wide- spread participation in interviews, each and every one of us is implicated in the pro- duction of who and what we are as the col- lection of individual subjects that populate our lives. 30 + INTRODUCTION From the Individual Interview to the Interview Society + 31 Of course, interviewing is found in places where it has been for decades, such as in applying for jobs, in clinical encoun- ters, and in the telephone surveys of public opinion polling. But it has also penetrated formerly hidden spaces, such as the foot- hills of the Himalayas and the everyday worlds of children and the seriously ill. In- terviews are everywhere these days, as re- searcherspursue respondents to the ends of the earth, as we offer our opinions and preferences to pollsters, in Internet ques- tionnaires, and to marketing researchers, as we bare our souls to therapists and healers in the "privacy" of the clinic aswell as in the mass media. With its penetration and globalization, the interview has become a worldwide form of cultural production. Regardless of social venue or geographic location- characteristics that were once argued to be empirically distinct or interpersonally isolating-the methodical application of interview technology is bringing us into a single world of accounts and accountabil- ity. Despite its community borders and na- tional and linguistic boundaries, it is a world that can be described in the common language of sample characteristics and whose subjectivities can be represented in terms of individualized voices. Whereas we once might have refrained from examining Asian village women's stories in relation to the accounts of their urban European coun- terparts-because the two groups were un- derstood to be culturally and geographi- References cally distinct-the women's ability to respond to interviews now makes it possi- ble for us to compare their experiences in the same methodological terms. The interview is such a common infor- mation-gathering procedure that it seems to bring all experience together narratively. Of course, there are technical challenges and local narrative solutions that cannot be overlooked. But technology is only the pro- cedural scaffolding of what is a broad cul- turally productive enterprise. More and more, the interview society provides both a sense of who we are and the method by which we represent ourselves and our ex- periences. This returns us to the leading theme of this Handbook: The interview is part and parcel of society, not simply a mode of inquiry into and about society. If it is part of, not just a conduit to, our personal lives, then we might well entertain the pos- sibility that the interview's ubiquity serves to produce communicatively and ramify the very culture it ostensibly only inquires about. It is in the spirit of this cultural, aswell as its constituent technical, activity that this Handbook is presented. As the contributors deftly describe the interview's varied mo- dalities, distinctive respondents, technical dimensions, auspices, analytic strategies, and reflections and representations, they also specify the most common procedural facilitator for the expression of experience of our times. Abu-Lughod, L. 1993. Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alasuutari, I? 1998. An Invitation to Social Research. London: Sage. Atkinson, I? and D. 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